“Yeah, we all need someone we can bleed on
Yeah, and if you want it, baby, well you can bleed on me.”

– Mick Jagger/Keith Richards

So this blog is about blood, but these days it seems that to talk about blood constantly involves talking about the Donald J. Trump, President of the United States. This at once very obvious and very odd, but I think there is an actual reason that blood keeps coming up these days, and it has to do both with material blood, blood symbolism,the President’s idea of how drugs and the nation relate, and the Rolling Stones.

Today, January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump was sworn in as President of the United States. His inaugural speech offered surprisingly few novel thoughts, instead echoing stump speeches of his campaign. Some of the perhaps grander moments of the speech aimed for a lofty nationalism as the umbrella for a unified US. Politics aside, the bloody images in the speech offer a surprisingly clear vision of how Trump conceives of the nation.

Elise Greene was charged with assault on a government officer and vandalism, according to a Charlotte NBC station report, for smearing blood on officers. This seems a drastic response to a gesture that protests police violence by materializing the pain caused by this violence in the form of blood. But blood in the world of police officers is anything but a simple matter. Police work and blood are intimately connected, and I want to lay out some major aspects of this connection in order to not only explain the facts behind the police punishment for bleeding on officers, but also the connection between police work and vulnerable populations.